St. Peter’s Episcopal Church
2 Advent
Mark 1:1-8
The Beginning of the Gospel
The Rev. B. P. Campbell
Repent. Help is on the Way.
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the
Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead
of you,
who will
prepare your way;
the voice of
one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths
straight,’ ”
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a
baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside
and all the people of
I want to talk with you this morning about what it means to prepare the
way of the Lord. That wonderful phrase comes
from the beginning of the Book of Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40:1-11), which we read
this morning, and is quoted in the first few verses of the first Gospel ever
written, the Gospel of
Mark:
“The voice of one crying in the
wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
The image in Second Isaiah is of a herald shouting forth at the entrance
to a road leading from
builder: Make the paths straight. Cut through the hills. Fill in the valleys. Make a straight and level road for the exiles
to return.
The preparation here is described in divine terms. “Make straight in the
desert a highway for our God.” Now,
unless the God of the universe is literally going to make this journey,
something else is meant by this phrase.
This is a path that God wants to be created, a journey which God wants
taken.
So we are talking about the paths that God wants to be created, and
the journeys which he wants to be
taken. These roads have be created, and these journeys taken, whether or not there
is an increase in the gas tax or the sales tax for highway construction. They need to be created and taken whether or
not you and I feel capable of creating them.
They need to be created and taken whether you are a democrat or a republican,
a liberal or a conservative. They need to be created and taken whether you are
Christian or Muslim, whether you are Jew or Arab, whether you are a citizen of
the wealthiest county in the
My message this morning is this: Repent!
I have four things to say about Repentance:
1. Repentance tells the truth.
2. Repentance accurately identifies sin.
3. Repentance banishes guilt and denial.
4. Repentance needs a herald.
When the Lord comes, he will help us.
What we are doing is what we can do.
We are not God. We cannot solve
the world’s most difficult problems by ourselves. But we can do what we can do -- we can
prepare by repentance. To prepare the way of the Lord, you have to deal with
Repentance. You do this for only one
simple reason: Help is on the Way.
1. Repentance tells the truth.
To understand repentance, Isaiah says, we need to look at the work of
the road builder. A good engineer is
dispassionate. He looks at the
landscape. He sees a hill here. He sees
a valley there. He looks at what needs
to be done. He draws it out. To make the road straight, you have to do
this work. This is the time it will
take. This is what it will cost. The engineer is not the policy maker. He doesn’t know whether you can afford to do
what he says. He doesn’t know whether
you should do what he says. There may be
other factors which make his proposals ridiculous, or vastly immoral, or
scandalous, or completely impossible. Engineers can be infuriating because they
are so dispassionate. But their
dispassion is their gift. They see
clearly. They tell the truth.
Repentance is not about feeling sorry.
It is about cool, clear, accurate judgement. This is why repentance is so difficult. Contrary to what we may think, God is not
interested in our guilt. He is not
interested in blame. He is interested in a good, straight roadway so that he
can bring help to
2. Repentance accurately identifies
sin.
Repentance deals with sin. When
you understand sin, you understand why it is so hard for us to have clear,
accurate judgement -- why it is so hard for us to
build the roadway of truth.
In the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus’ teaching, there are always two kinds
of sin we have to deal with. These are
personal sin, and corporate sin. Both are always present. The issue of repentance is not to be without
sin, according to Jesus’ teaching: “Let him who is without sin cast the first
stone.” (John 8:7) Repentance begins
with accurate identification of sin: the sin of your own time, your own
situation, your own stage of development, your own place in life. Whether you can fix it or not is not the
issue. What we are talking about here is the engineer’s job. Make the path straight. Tell the truth.
When it comes to personal Sin, Look at the disrepair in your life and ask what is controlling you from within: When you are
controlled by any one of the destructive emotions or feelings: lust, anger,
bitterness, greed, and unable to find love, forgiveness, and justice in your
personal dealings, sin is in charge, evil is present. The issue is not whether there is sin or
crookedness in us. The issue is simply
accurate diagnosis.
When it comes to corporate sin, the issue is justice -- economic,
political, ethnic, and social justice.
Simply and briefly put, in engineer’ s
language: if the hills are too high and the
valleys are too low, you can’t have a highway for our God. Or to put it more baldly, if the rich are
getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, something is wrong. If people are oppressing other people,
something is wrong. If our economy or
government or social group is adding to the unfairness of the world, some thing
is wrong. We are going in the wrong
direction.
Sin is always both individual and corporate. Repentance deals with sin
-- with an
accurate description of the problem.
3.
Repentance banishes guilt and denial
Guilt and denial: This little
team prevents repentance throughout the world on an hourly basis. I am afraid -- and even more than me, governments
and groups of people are afraid -- that if we admit the truth we will
have to fix it, and we will be unable to bear the guilt of not fixing it. If we cannot fix it, or don’t want to fix it,
we will not be able to live with ourselves.
Very often it is not our insensitivity to sin, but our fear of guilt,
which makes us deny that distortion and injustice are present.
To repent is to tell the truth.
It is to tell the truth about my own problems and most distressing inner
distortions. It is to tell the truth
about the aggressive injustice of the world in which we live and the
difficulties which we face in addressing it.
It is to listen to the
engineers.
To listen to the heralds. To listen to the truthtellers.
To
listen carefully, with the ears of God,
because we are preparing his way.
4. Repentance needs a herald.
Prepare the way of the Lord.
Repent. Help is on the way.
A voice cries out: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every
mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the
rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all
people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."
For truth to be told, and for the help to come, we need a herald. “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion,
herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald
of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, "Here
is your God!"
Heralds are not just individual.
In a corporate world, they must also be institutional. This is one of our greatest problems in a
nation of unprecedented wealth and therefore, of unprecedented economic
control. It is not only hard to want to
hear the truth, hard to repent. It is
hard even to get the truth told. Someone
powerful always has an investment in not having the truth told. The devil hates the truth. He knows it provides a highway for our
God. So we need heralds: individuals and
institutions
I want to salute my mother this morning for 100 years of trying to do
the herald’s work. She has done it in
her personal and professional life in three related ways. First, in support of the
church. Second,
in support of public education. And third, in support of public television.
a. The church is about creating an environment in which the truth can be
told. That is why we protect our clergy,
giving them tenure, respect, and the ability to speak to us whether we like
what they say or not. We protect our
churches from the government, whether or not they use the protection properly
to address the issues our government doesn’t want to face at home or abroad.
b. Public education is about teaching children about the breadth of the
world -- your typical SOL list -- but it is also about teaching people to ask
questions, to seek the truth, to seek meaning -- what the educators call
critical thinking.
c. Public television is about creating a medium of communication in this
unbelievably high dollar, high cost of entry, highly-controlled-by-money
communications environment which we have created in America, which can
occasionally have some freedom from the economic powers which are in
control. It is about creating
programming in answer to the question, “What do people really need to know,”
rather than “what will entertain, what will sell my product, what will get the
largest, quickest audience.”
These three media are the most important ones in our society today: the
church, public education, and public television. It is no accident that my Mom has been
involved in them for most of her first century, because they all came from the
same place in her -- a desire for truth, a sense of value, a
knowledge of community, a love for God -- which were in her at the
beginning when she was a little girl.
The focus changed, as the situation changed. But the business of
preparing the way of the Lord was there at the beginning and has continued to
this very day.
So I’d like to salute my Mom this morning as a person who understood
what we can do, and what we can’t do, as well as anyone I know. Then she went about doing it. She has dedicated her life to the joy of
doing what we can
do: finding those high mountains which
this society offers where the herald can get up and call out to prepare the way
of the Lord; to tell the truth: church, public education, public
television. The truth is our most
precious gift. It is the one thing which
God can use. And it is always under
attack
-- from
powers on the outside, and from our own denial and guilt within.
1. Repentance tells the truth.
2. Repentance accurately identifies sin.
3. Repentance banishes guilt and denial.
4. Repentance needs a herald.
Prepare the way of the Lord.
Repent. Find the truth. Identify sin
accurately.
Banish guilt and denial. Support
the heralds. Help is on the
way. AMEN